The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, a non profit organisation at Duke Law School, has made available a worthwhile read in the form of a comic. It examines the legal & ethical boundaries of copyright and intellectual property versus public domain, and the impact that these boundaries have on our society. How far should we go in protecting property? When should people be allowed to use material for their creative pursuits?

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon. Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain

So, if this issue is of concern to you, make sure you check out the comic.

And no, I am not being “unfairly discriminatory” here: anybody who knows how to read a log file and do a little digging can find out where script kiddie attacks are coming from (I’m not talking about “real” hackers here—the kind that know how to conceal their activity by rerouting their page requests).

So from now on, anyone in China or the Russian Federation trying to directly access this site is now being blocked. Sorry folks, but enough is enough.

I got my IP range for China at www.okean.com and for the Russian Federation at www.countryipblocks.net. The downside is that it increases my .htaccess file to a whopping 150kb—which is a shame as this file is read by Apache with every request to the server.

Meet Moe

One of the reasons could be that on large scale enterprise networks it takes a lot of effort, skill and funds to update the contents of a Managed Operating Environment (MOE). For me, this would be a prime reason to drop IE altogether in favour of a browser that does not tie into the heart of the OS the way Internet Explorer does. I dare say potential security issues would be much easier to deal with if users are not exposing the core of their OS by surfing with a browser that is entirely integrated. It certainly would facilitate updating the browser more frequently.

So, while I understand that MOE updates are difficult to roll out, system administrators (and especially the CEOs who manage the sys admins) should understand that keeping IE6 alive makes web development more cumbersome and therefore, more expensive. I am still working on intranet/extranet/public sites that are designed for IE6. It is a costly process which also holds back web development in general.

Dinosaur

And let’s face it, IE6 is a dinosaur these days: it was initially released on August 27, 2001. Which makes it, at the time of this post, nearly 8 years old. I shall repeat that: nearly 8 years old. To put that into perspective: while early history of the web can be traced back to the 1980s, initial mainstream adoption of the web (outside of university labs) did not take place until around 1993. That is 16 years ago. By that calculation, IE6 is as old as half the age of the WWW. Methinks it is time to drop IE6. What says you sys admins?

IE7 was released on October 18, 2006 (after Microsoft reluctantly continued development of IE after it saw its market share quickly lose ground to Firefox). And we’ve just seen the release of IE8 on March 19, 2009.

Further Reading

• History of the Web (Wikipedia)
• History of IE (Wikipedia)
• IE6 Death March
• Put IE6 out of its misery – A list of Anti IE6 Websites.

The nation reported launching a satellite into orbit for the “soul” purpose of broadcasting patriotic songs from space. This, of course, to make North Korea’s rice grow faster and feed an increasingly angry population. All those who believe in the beneficial effect of revolutionary songs on rice growth hailed the launch as a great success and considered it money well spent. Those on the other side of the fence were hardly exhilarated and much less able to conceptualise its merits and expressed their dismay over the selection of songs that made it into orbit: they were looking for something rather more upbeat.

Dang–these be interesting times for sure…

Be Clear

Please don’t put us into a position where we have to decipher your intentions. When we have to do that, it takes up more of our time and the extra work involved will end up costing you more of your hard earned cash. Heck, it may even annoy us (and annoyed designers are far less productive than designers who are in good spirits).

Quality Content

As a site proprietor it is up to you to ensure that content is up to scratch. Well written content will please your visitors and generate more revenue for you as the owner of the site. On top of that, good designers put a lot of effort into properly crafted designs and prefer to see their hard work being matched by equally well crafted copy. At the very least, and at all times, run a spell checker on your copy before sending it out for publication.

Be Clear, Again

Actually write some copy. Don’t just give us vague hints: “uhm, this needs to say something down the lines of…” Consider us dumb machines: we need specific instructions (unless we actually have been contracted to be copy editors). If you don’t know how to write content, consider hiring someone who does.

Deliver Content In An Appropriate Format

Deliver content in an appropriate format: for instance, RTF (Rich Text File) or Microsoft Word. It is much harder for us to strip content from a PDF than convert a properly marked up RTF for example. You can also help us by highlighting the changed content.

Don’t Change Your Mind (Unless You Have To)

If updates have been scheduled to take place at a particular time don’t send us anything until then (unless our opinion is called for). We really don’t need the content until the actual updates are about to take place. Chances are you will change your mind in the meantime. Sending us multiple emails with conflicting requests for content updates will simply confuse us, and there is a chance we’ll miss some of your instructions. Of course you’ll want to send us revised copy when situations change, making clear that previous content has been scrapped.

Observe Email Etiquette

When you are sending us content via email, give emails a clear subject heading. That way, if we need to refer to your emails at a later stage we can easily find them again.

Also, refrain from giving updates about your sister’s friend’s cat. Business emails are for business, and generally should be limited to just that: business. It makes our job so much easier. While we may want to hear about the cat, we prefer you to give us an update in another email.

In Conclusion

While I’m sure I’ve left out some useful aspects of effective content delivery, these pointers will go a long way to helping us being more efficient and allow us to do what we do best: craft beautiful and useful sites.

Please remember that the more work you create for us, the more we have to bill you for.

I’m afraid that this sounds like database corruption. The cause of this is unknown to us at this point. Vienna’s database is located at “~/Library/Application Support/Vienna.messages.db”. If you backup your home folder frequently (which everyone should), then you can quit Vienna, delete “messages.db”, and replace it with a recent backup. If you don’t have a backup, there may also be a file “messages.db.bak” in the same folder; check the last modification date on that, and if it’s recent enough, then you can quit Vienna, delete messages.db, and remove the “.bak” extension to use your old database.

If you don’t have either of those things, then you still should be able to export your subscriptions and re-import them. Export all of your subscriptions, quit Vienna, move “messages.db” to a different folder, and re-launch Vienna. That will create a fresh database, and then you can import your subscriptions again.

Jeff Johnson, Vienna Developer on the cocoa|forge forum

Oh bother… Guess my Vienna database is corrupted. And I’m not one of those smart people making regular back ups of their home directory either.

This could be a blessing in disguise since I was not being able to keep up with my reading. I’ll take some time to clean out my messy RSS repository and start over. No doubt there will be a number of gems to links to…

Al Franken may still win his seat in the US senate as Minnesota representative. If he does, will he still be allowed to tell the truth (with jokes) ?

As a comedian, former Saturday Night Live writer and political commentator as well as radio host, Al Franken can already look back on a long and at times controversial career.

• Franken up 225 votes (Star Tribune article)
• Official Al Franken site.
• Al Franken on Wikipedia

Took the opportunity to venture into Taipei on my way over. Interesting place. Wouldn’t mind going back there again.

A freaky performance–a very tight drill indeed.

Alright, it’s time to get back to work…

Sorry sir, our roads are simply not compatible with that nice and shiny vehicle of yours.

Hmmm. Let me see. Don’t support a browser that has been released mere days ago. But if I take the 10-yr old bug ridden IE v6 for a spin around these parts I would have no issues? Of course I can use the site just fine with Opera—so the message is completely useless and a mere nuisance at best. And here I was, thinking that we were starting to come to terms with web standards.

But then again, such a dubious site as the RipOff Report surely is only a mere outpost on the World Wild Web. The further you remove yourself from the buzzing hive in the centre, the harder it gets to properly maintain an infrastructure…